


Space

by zenstrike



Category: Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Attempt at Humor, M/M, post-destroy, shifting pov, strange times and dorks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-02
Updated: 2017-08-02
Packaged: 2018-12-10 07:11:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,739
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11686632
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zenstrike/pseuds/zenstrike
Summary: Garrus dreams about Shepard. They have old conversations again, and conversations they never got to have. He thinks he’s trying to cope.---It's over and everything is upside down. All they need to do is get back to each other.





	Space

**Author's Note:**

  * For [FallingOverSideways](https://archiveofourown.org/users/FallingOverSideways/gifts).



“ _I know what you are, Vakarian,” Shepard says, all but sprawled over the terminal and staring, maybe for the first time, down at Garrus. Garrus, who tries to focus on reports and succinct messages and the war raging on throughout the galaxy while this—whatever this is—carries on in the sturdy cage of the_ Normandy _._

_He clears his throat._

_“Oh yeah?” he says, and aims for nonchalance. He misses._

_Shepard doesn’t._

_“Oh yeah,” Shepard continues. He studies his own hands and whistles out the side of his mouth. Garrus waits, despite his best efforts not to. “You’re a romantic. Hopeless.”_

_“Right,” Garrus says, and finally realizes he’s staring up at Shepard though he’s sure that isn’t how this actually happened but there are gaps to fill in everything, spots where starlight peeks through._

_Memories with holes to cover._

_“So.” Shepard slaps his hands against the terminal. It beeps indignantly. Garrus agrees, silently. “You need to be wooed.”_

_“What?”_

_“Letters. Poetry. You like poetry? I don’t. Hate the stuff. Don’t get it. Maybe turian poetry’s different.”_

_“Shepard,” Garrus says, and he remembers the stiffness in his neck when he tries to look up. “What are you talking about?”_

_There are bags under Shepard’s eyes and scars splintering the side of his face and neck. He doesn’t smile like he used to, doesn’t have the facial function to do it anymore or refuses to regain it._

_Gaps._

_“Nothing much.” Shepard shrugs. He backs away, two slow steps and then_ stop _. He tilts his head. “Let it go, bud. It’s all done.”_

_Garrus almost wants the real memory back._

* * *

 

After day two, Joker began calling everyone ‘bud’ in a vague sort of memoriam to Shepard. Or to EDI. Garrus can’t tell.

He knows grief. He knows anger. One of Joker’s legs is broken in too many places for Chakwas to count without a drink or two.

They’re all a mess.

Garrus feels like choking Joker, but he doesn’t. Instead, he spends most of those first two days sitting and sleeping and hoping he’ll wake up and it will have been a dream. He tells Liara this and she only laughs.

Garrus dreams about Shepard. They have old conversations again, and conversations they never got to have. He thinks he’s trying to cope. Chakwas says he might have an infection and saying the word makes her lips curl in a way that reminds them both that Garrus is, without a doubt, her very worst patient.

He almost feels bad. Half-bad.

And then he’s the first one to step into Shepard’s battered cabin. Liara frets from the doorway until she just leaves, and Garrus is alone in the dim emergency lighting.

At least the fish tanks aren’t broken. Several of Shepard’s precious models are, scattered pieces of them and glass littering the floor. He straightens the desk chair and sits, surveying the cabin and reveling in the slow failure of his pain meds.

“We’re a little stuck,” he says out loud, and immediately feels foolish. He shifts uncomfortably in the chair. He stands. He sits back down. “Okay, we’re very stuck. It’s bad, Shepard.”

He sighs.

And then he tears the cabin apart and he’s a tornado that no amount of frightening red light and bad driving could challenge. He doesn’t know exactly what he’s looking for until it’s too late and he proceeds to hate himself and then, as he finds no evidence of any sort of letter or (spirits) poem, he hates Shepard.

“Garrus?”

He freezes, hunched over the overturned mattress. He doesn’t look up. Liara clears her throat.

“Welcome back,” he manages out, and tears into the mattress without remorse.

“What are you doing?”

She doesn’t sound surprised.

He supposes nothing is surprising anymore.

He supposes they all need Shepard to appear out of the void and give them all a reassuring pat on the back. _War’s over, folks! Nothing left to fight here! Least of all each other, am I right?_

“We shouldn’t have left him,” Garrus says, and he is suddenly very tired. He straightens and shakes fluff from his talons. When he looks at her, Liara’s eyes are big and sad and it’s right on the edge of being more than he can take. He looks away again.

“He was trying to protect us,” Liara replies, and then there’s a moment of quiet that seems edged with something just shy of resentful—but Garrus thinks he’s also just _sensitive_. “He was trying to protect you.”

“You sound almost accusatory, T’Soni,” he mutters.

“Do I?” she sighs, but she wades her way through her own silence to touch his arm. “What are you trying to find here?”

There are answers on the tip of his tongue.

Letters. Poems. Proof of life.

Hope.

He swallows them all.

“Anything,” he settles on, and something hard settles in his chest.

* * *

 

You could say that the end was the beginning and yadda yadda yadda but that’s not really how this works. Really it’s the product of years of back and forth and give and take and a whole lot more giving and even more running. A little death. A little disfigurement. Scars that leave gaping holes in memory and time and rows of bodies on a dirty floor. The roar of a reaper.

Enough sarcasm to get them both shot.

Loads of folks tried just that.

* * *

 

_There’s something flat about Shepard, when he comes back. He tries to shake it off and fails again and again. They are all witness to it. They say nothing, because they are Shepard’s and even his new Cerberus-infused crew knows this. Garrus thinks dying changes a person. He thinks this because he wonders how it would have changed him if Shepard hadn’t appeared like a miracle summoned by Garrus’s father, all unrestrained glee and something desperate that comes and goes. A suicide mission, indeed. Steam, indeed._

_It went well, Garrus thinks. It went right. It went better than he could have hoped._

_And then Shepard had looked at him and it had been startling in a way that melted him from the inside out. Something is different, he had thought. It’s a hint of the man who had been lost to silence and suffocation. The one Tali insists is long gone and the one Liara insists is making his way back to them (to her). They all carry a little bit of hope and Garrus, privately, thinks hope and relief made Ashley angry and unkind._

_Garrus had stopped hoping for Shepard when his friend and his mentor had died on a fool’s errand and left the galaxy a little bit emptier. He doesn’t know how to do it anymore._

_He had turned away, he had run, and Shepard had tried and failed to hide his disappointment._

_But this time, he reaches out to Shepard. “We’ve got time,” he says._

_“So much time,” Shepard agrees. He fills in the gaps of places of Garrus can’t reach himself and that’s how he knows (now—too late--) that this is love._

_But Garrus wakes and his self-hatred overwhelms him and it’s just enough to hide the constant, aching grief._

* * *

 

They are all ragged and irritated and just shy of hating one another when they finally return to the Sol system.

It is a graveyard. Garrus tries, at first, to remember what it looked like during their desperate flight from the system and the encroaching red light from the Crucible. He fails. He lets it go. They all pile onto the bridge and Joker mutters some half-hearted wisecrack that Garrus can’t hear. And then Liara grabs him just enough to make him look at her and he thinks she might just be crying.

_You’re the Shadowbroker_ , he starts to remind her but then she clears her throat.

“Garrus,” she says. “Before we find him—“

“Oh no,” Tali mutters. “Let me leave first.”

“We are not having a heart to heart,” Garrus tells her, flatly.

Liara smiles. She brushes away her tears. She lets him go.

Garrus thinks he wasn’t hers to have.

“Alright,” she says slowly.

“Thank God,” Ashley grumbles.

And in the quiet, Tali begins to giggle until the bridge of the battered Normandy is overflowing with the sound of all of their laughter. James almost throws up.

There’s a little bit of hope there, Garrus thinks. Deep in his chest: a little bit of hope, mingled with excitement and a thousand clumsy professions.

_Shepard,_ he thinks but can’t go much further. But it’s alright, because he’ll save it for when they’re together again.

Ashley breaks into a mournful moan when they get the news. James catches her, holds her tight until she pushes him back and storms away. It’s a wave of renewed pain that all of them feel.

No.

“No,” Garrus says out loud.

“Garrus—“ Liara starts, and he bats her hand away.

“No,” he insists. “He’s out there.”

“You don’t know that,” James says.

“Actually,” Garrus snaps. “I do.”

He feels angry. His words feel empty.

_No_ , he thinks again. _No_.

Wasted time weighs on him. It gives him the strength not to surrender.

Years of back and forth and a whole pile of pining. That’s what it was. Pining. Mismatched time and feelings and so, so much pining. It began on Omega.

In a way, it ended on Earth, in the light of the beam. Fucking finally. Too late.

The pain is unbearable. Don’t make him talk about it. It’s hard enough just to focus on not dying.

Dying is silence and right now he needs noise

* * *

 

_Light and pain and it’s a little too close to the last memorable moments of Archangel for Garrus’s comfort. And above him, like before, comes Shepard’s voice._

_“I’m fine,” he manages out and his face still works so there’s that._

_“Liara,” he hears Shepard snap. “Are you alright?”_

_“I’m here,” she gasps out by way of answering._

_“Help me get him up.”_

_“I’m fine,” Garrus says and pulls himself to a sitting position but Shepard and Liara carry him the rest of the way._

_There’s a blink, and the beam is in the distance and casting Shepard’s face in shadow. Garrus wants to see him._

_“I love you,” but who says it? It doesn’t matter. He’ll remember exactly what he wants to._

_“Just come back,” Garrus insists._

_Shepard turns just enough that Garrus can see his lopsided grin. “How could I stay away now that I’ve won you over?”_

_The last sight they have of him: standing alone, armed to the teeth and ready. A hero. A martyr._

_Garrus can’t breathe, no matter how much Liara reminds him he must._

* * *

 

He was right.

It hurts.

Ashley cries, unashamed. Eventually, James does too.

Joker loses his leg and refuses to see Shepard—“Not until he’s awake, not until I can tear him a new one without guilt. You know?”

Garrus knows.

Tali and Liara join him in his vigil at Shepard’s bedside. Occasionally, Javik appears just long enough to say something unabashedly cruel. He makes Garrus laugh. Garrus thinks he wants to say something awful enough that Shepard will leap out of his bed and knock him into next Tuesday.

Shepard is a mess. He barely breathes. A machine helps him. It’s been long enough that they talk about letting him go, ‘ending his fight,’ but Garrus won’t let them. He’s resolute. He knows Shepard isn’t done fighting.

Hackett challenges him, just once. He asks how Garrus knows he can make this decision, how he can keep a man clinging on to a painful and uncertain life. He accuses Garrus of cruelty. And Garrus falters, just that once, until Liara stands at his elbow and says: “You don’t understand who you’re talking to.”

The Shadowbroker lives. Hackett backs away. Garrus all but collapses into his chair and he very clearly begs Shepard to wake up. Liara leaves the room without comment.

And one morning, when he is alone in between their friends’ shifts, he wakes a horrible sound and the erratic beeping of Shepard’s monitors.

Shepard, eyes wide and erratic and too bright, staring right at him. Struggling to lift his head. Reaching out to Garrus with one stub of an arm.

Fighting.

* * *

 

_“I’ve always wanted to have a darling. Come, be my darling, Garrus.”_

_“No.”_

_And Shepard laughs and Garrus just shakes his head and Shepard tries to reach out to him but he’s missing a hand._

_He tries to scream but his jaw falls away and his throat closes tight and Garrus is long gone._

* * *

 

Shepard opens his eyes.

Garrus seems to be waiting for him.

Shepard tries to smile. He coughs instead, and Garrus helps him sit up long enough to sip at some water.

“Welcome back,” Garrus says when Shepard is lying flat again.

“Thanks,” Shepard croaks. He clears his throat. He looks away, trying to peer around the sterile room. Everything hurts, so he looks at Garrus. He tries to smile again, but all he manages is a twitch.

Garrus’s mandibles flare once, twice.

Oh, Shepard thinks.

He wants to say _I love you_ , like he isn’t sure he’s going to be here in ten minutes. He doesn’t. He wants more than that to keep Garrus right where he is, close enough that he could touch—

He tries to find his arm. He fails.

Oh, Shepard thinks again.

“It’s okay,” Garrus says.

“Yeah,” Shepard agrees. “Yeah.”

More quiet. Garrus is suddenly still as a statue. Shepard wonders if he’s afraid of frightening him, or breaking him. Of breathing. His heart stutters in his chest. He wants to close his eyes against the onslaught of anxiety and pain, but he’s too scared that Garrus will disappear like a ghost if given half a chance. They’re supposed to be beyond this, Shepard knows, but insecurity is probably too much like phantom limb pain for him to be comfortable.

Even he doesn’t find himself funny.

“So,” he croaks. “Been waiting by my bedside, huh?”

“Yeah,” Garrus replies without hesitation.

Shepard blinks. And finally, he smiles. “Sorry about that,” he manages out, soft as a whisper.

“Yeah,” Garrus says again. And then: “I tried to write you a poem.”

“Stupid shit, right?”

“It’s been hell without you.”

Shepard’s smile fades away. There’s a beep from a machine as his heart rate picks up, and all he can think to do about it is ignore it. Thankfully, Garrus does the same.

“Yeah,” Shepard says. “Garrus—“

“Let’s get married,” Garrus says, and the words are sounded out slow and deliberate like he’s been practicing them, but he follows this with a twitchy stare like he can’t quite believe what’s left his mouth. He stumbles. “I mean. Do you want to get married?”

They stare at each other. Shepard swears his heart stops for a moment. He’s gaping, and then wrestles control of himself long enough to clear his throat. “Come on, Garrus. Try again.” He’s smiling before he realizes it and that’s okay.

More quiet, during which they stare at each other and Shepard wonders, just for a moment, if he’s pushed Garrus just a little too far. If he isn’t going to leap from his chair and run from the room and never come back.

Garrus looks down at his knees for a moment, and then back up at Shepard. He’s all resolve, with an expression that reminds Shepard that sitting next to him is the sniper he began to rely on so many years before. It’s an expression that he’s seen in a hundred irritating contests with Ashley, and during stupid banter with James (his crew, his crew, what about his crew—), and during one stolen afternoon high on the Citadel.

Shepard doesn’t know what’s left of the galaxy he knew and gratitude suddenly overwhelms him and he wants nothing more than to just _touch_ Garrus, just something to let him know that they are both here and breathing and steady even if nothing else is.

“Well, Shepard,” Garrus says, and he leans forward as his voice grows softer. Shepard’s smile doesn’t falter. “Now that you’re back from the dead, again.”

“Again,” Shepard agrees.

“Will you marry me?”

“Well,” Shepard replies loftily. “Why not?”

“I take it back.” But Garrus touches his shoulder anyways and Shepard can’t stop grinning and if he didn’t know better he’d say both sides of his mouth were lifted way, way up.

And Shepard thinks, finally and for the first time: it’s done.

**Author's Note:**

> I HOPE YOU LIKE IT!!


End file.
